Bomberman 64

When it came time to bring popular franchises into the world of 3D, everyone had different ideas on how to go about doing so. Mario and Sonic kept things fairly close to their roots in terms of general gameplay from the get-go and benefited greatly from doing so, whereas cases like Mortal Kombat and Prince of Persia had serious growing pains before figuring things out. Bomberman… lies somewhere in the middle. The core concepts of Bomberman – navigating mazes, trapping opponents with bombs while avoiding explosions – are all things that make sense in 2D, but become more difficult to incorporate in 3D, at least if you’re interested in doing something ambitious with the transition. 3-D Bomberman served as a good example of how tricky adapting these concepts into a different perspective could be. Hudson Soft clearly wanted to try new things with this opportunity because Bomberman 64 is much different than anything before it. Despite being a 3D game with the most expansive levels yet, Bomberman isn’t able to jump normally and many of the classic rules apply (such as dying in one hit and having to collect power-ups), so what you end up getting is a curious concoction of Bomberman concepts and a deceptively devious puzzle platformer collectathon.

With a new dimension comes a new villain; the space pirate Altair and his subordinates get their hands on a mysterious artifact known as the Omni-Cube and immediately use it to attempt the destruction of Planet Bomber. Naturally, White Bomberman won’t stand for this, but instead of getting Black involved, he’s joined by Sirius, a mysterious robot capable of flight who has personal reasons for wanting to stop Altair. For the first time ever, the story requires some serious legwork if you’re to see it through.

Thanks to a dearth of text and cutscenes, you’ll only learn about Sirius’ backstory if you seek him out across multiple levels, but if you want to see the actual conclusion to the story and learn the truth about him, you’ll have to collect all 100 Gold Cards within the first five worlds. These collectibles are often very well hidden, requiring you to break otherwise ordinary looking blocks, defeat bosses in very particular ways, defeat 30 enemies per stage, clear every stage quickly enough, and find your way to distant platforms using advanced bomb jumping techniques not mentioned in the game’s tutorial or manual. If you go into the game without outside assistance, you won’t have the knowledge needed to get some of them until the necessary tricks are shown during the game’s credits. The funny thing is that, despite the Gold Cards making this an easy pick for the hardest entry thus far, in an interview with director Hitoshi Okuno and designer Koji Innami for Dengeki Nintendo 64, they state that the focus on exploration was a response to being told that “playing Bomberman feels too much like hard work”!

Bomberman’s moveset has undergone significant changes, giving this game one of the steepest learning curves of any entry in the franchise. Instead of exploding in a cross shape, bombs now have a spherical blast radius. To make getting used to this easier, enemies are slow and passive and it’s possible to stun them with a kicked bomb. Speaking of bomb kick, it and bomb throw are built-in functions now, which allows the game to account for them in its level design at all times. Bombs can be held onto for as long as you need and if you mash the A button while doing so, you can turn them into larger bombs that’ll reach further with their explosions and destroy objects that normal bombs can’t. The power-up variety is scant, with only bomb/fire-ups, hyper bombs, and hearts, but the remote bombs were made even more dominant than they already were thanks to new mechanics that require having them if you want to utilize them without having the deftness of a speedrunner.

Though Bomberman can’t jump, if he lands on top of a bomb after dropping from a ledge, he’ll bounce off it and continue to move in his current direction. If you place multiple bombs in the right sequence, you can chain these bounces to get Bomberman across gaps and up onto platforms that are otherwise impossible to reach. To add even more depth, stacking bombs on top of each other and/or incorporating big bombs into your jumps can change your trajectory as well. If you place a bomb behind you, throw another at the wall of a nearby platform, and then place another as the one you threw hits you, you can actually use the knockback from the thrown bomb to bounce you off of the bomb behind you and move upward onto the platform! These tricks are challenging to get used to, what with the sensitive controls and inconsistent feeling physics, but if you’re patient enough to commit them to muscle memory, it’s possible to skip past portions of stages and turn Bomberman 64 into a speedrunner’s delight.

In terms of its structure, Bomberman 64 takes a strange approach. Any of the first four worlds can be done in any order and each world has four stages, two of which are dedicated to boss fights. This gives the game a low stage count, but each stage offers unique ideas. Green Garden and Blue Resort rely heavily on making you work to unlock the exit, featuring things like a moving goal, water-related puzzles, and pathways that have to be opened with switches or bombs. Red Mountain’s emphasis on environmental hazards and elaborate minecart paths make it tricky to navigate. White Glacier is snow-themed, offering steep slopes, avalanches, and a clever gimmick that intentionally puts the camera in a suboptimal position and forces you to navigate treacherous paths. Black Fortress puts you through the wringer by making you run against oncoming traffic and navigate a trap-filled tower, and Rainbow Palace is the ultimate test of your bomb jumping skills.

While all of this makes for a sufficiently varied game, Bomberman 64 never finds a consistent pace. Depending on how you play, you’ll either blaze through it and reach an unsatisfying conclusion or you’ll spend significant time on each level in a way that’s often more frustrating in the moment but ultimately more rewarding. The difficulty curve is impressively inconsistent, further emphasizing it as something that only the patient will get anything meaningful out of.

As an early title on a platform with four controller ports built in, Bomberman 64 is rightfully beloved amongst fans for its multiplayer action. Its positive reputation doesn’t extend to critics at the time of its release, though, since many of them criticized it for what they believed was a worse offering than the SNES games. While the number of options isn’t the largest in the series, the ones available are high quality. The arena designs take full advantage of the 3D format and offer more verticality, depth, and even arena-specific sudden death events like rising water, crushing walls, and meteors that rain death from above. A new option called “Ghost” allows defeated players to run around and possess surviving Bombers to make them an easier target. To describe some of the arenas, “Field of Grass” takes place in a wide area that obscures everyone’s bombs, “Pyramid” puts everyone right next to each other on a pyramid surrounded by water, and “Up and Down” offers a central structure for close combat and narrow walkways that can easily assist with quick KOs or accelerate the self-destruction of a careless player.

If you collect costume pieces in the main game (many of which are hidden in even nastier ways than the Gold Cards!), you can also customize the appearance of your Bomberman for multiplayer, allowing you to spice things up in goofy ways. All of your abilities from the story carry over, which makes the pace of this entry particularly blistering because everyone can throw and kick bombs as soon as a round starts. This is likely why critics were displeased with this incarnation of the multiplayer; instead of being a game that starts slow and crescendos in intensity as players get eliminated, Bomberman 64 prefers to enable chaos faster than ever before, encouraging you to end matches quickly by “playing dirty” and doing things like throwing your opponents off of stages or stunlocking them with a barrage of kicked/thrown bombs.

Bomberman 64 is a fascinating approach to bringing a beloved 2D game into the third dimension. Though it attempts to adapt some core Bomberman concepts, it doesn’t really feel like anything before it, opting to forge an entirely unique path for better or worse. The exploratory action will resonate with those willing to put in the time to master its nuances and it’s by far the most substantial game in the series up to this point in terms of unlockables, but the steep difficulty has a real chance of scaring away newcomers and veterans alike. Despite there being three other N64 Bomberman games, including a direct sequel to this one, all of them opt to shy away from this game’s particular eccentricities, which just goes to show you how daring this game’s vision was. It’s a favorite amongst North American fans, but the game wasn’t a hit with critics at the time, generally getting 7s or lower from contemporary outlets like Nintendo Power, N64 Pro, Nintendo Magazine UK, and Gamespot with text that often read like a much worse score. Regardless of how frustrating and demanding it can get, it’s impossible not to respect Bomberman 64 for what it does because they really don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

Links

https://web.archive.org/web/20090825213538/http://www.gamespot.com/n64/action/bomberman64/review.html – An archived version of Gamespot’s review

https://randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com/bomb/n64-1/ref.html#media%3EMedia%3C/a%3E%3Cbr%3E%3Ca%20href= – A summary of every appearance of the game in contemporary magazines and a translation of the Dengeki Nintendo 64 interview

https://archive.org/details/n-64-pro-04/page/n29/mode/2up?q=Bomberman+64 – A review of the game in N64 Pro Issue #4

https://archive.org/details/nintendo-magazine-uk-64-january-1998/page/52/mode/2up?q=bomberman+6 – A review of the game in Nintendo Magazine (UK) issue #64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efias81CPeQ – A 100% speedrun by livelyraccoon, the #1 ranked player of the game on Speedrun.com

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